COAST THISTLE 01 Installation

ERIKA'S BACKGROUND • Erika Givens, a contemporary mixed media artist living and working in San Diego, California, grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area with a fascination for drawing, creating elaborate Lego cities and towns for her Hot Wheel cars. Focused on becoming an urban planner, she graduated from UC Santa Barbara (in Environmental Studies/Political Science) but the pull toward art eventually lead her to the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. After graduating, she landed at the Nokia Design Center in Los Angeles to work as a Senior Graphic Designer for the Asia Pacific region. She later moved on to other creative pursuits at various design firms in the Bay Area. Then in 2004, she ventured out on her own and launched GLEAUX (pronounced *glow*), a custom San Francisco-based stationery and invitation design studio. After relocating to San Diego in 2012 along with her husband Chad, and three young children, Luke, Reid, and Brooklyn, she transitioned her studio from graphic design to creating mixed media wall sculptures. Over time, she’s managed to build a uniquely personal portfolio of artwork that has found its way into distinguished galleries, international art shows, a handful of world class hotels and private home collections across the globe. ERIKA'S WORK • While her pieces each communicate their own visual cadence and dimensional rhythm, each also represents a different process and aesthetic. The inspiration behind her work springs from all things organic, geometric, textured, patterned, curiously meticulous, and peculiarly beautiful. Her materials usually come from the sea or the soil, and can include such things as dried plant life, marine material, pods, seeds, wood, shells, natural botanical fibers, clay, etc. These objects are then often hand-manipulated, resurfaced, reshaped, and rearranged, in such a way as to become a new abstracted whole. The circle is an element central to a lot of her work because it symbolizes balance, healing, self, interconnectedness, infinity, perfection, cyclical time/movement, and unification. In studying the circle, she has also found inspiration in repeating patterns, micrographic line art, antique botanical and aquatic engravings, the vector of a curve, the fluidity and life force of water, dimension in sculpture, and texture in organic surfaces. A huge part of her work is execution.